Visitors attending large scale events at stadiums and concert halls are served by concession stands scattered all over these venues. The sales of food, beverages and merchandise at these concession stands presents a sizable source of income. However, the queuing time at these concession stands, as well as toilets and exits, varies significantly over the duration of the event. For example, the queues are often at their longest right before and after the event, as well as during the intermission.
During these peak moments, an excessive visitor traffic leads to overcrowding as they move simultaneously from the seating area to concession stands in the atrium along relatively narrow corridors and passages. In addition, crowds are often gathered around the concession stands after making their purchase, in order to finish their alcoholic beverages and/or food before heading into the seating area. Due to the crowd amassed in the foyer or atrium, it is difficult for visitors to seek and identify the queue with the shortest waiting time. For example, visitors tend to converge towards the concession stands they have grown accustomed to, or the first concession stand they come across, without noticing there may be another concession stand in the vicinity that offers a shorter waiting time. The uneven distribution of crowd may lead to loss of sales as the concession stands are not fully utilised during the relatively short time window. Furthermore, an uneven distribution of crowd also leads to employee stress, as well as longer waiting time and overall unpleasant experience for the visitors.
US2010/0277333A1 discloses a system for adjusting a dynamics level of a lighting atmosphere based on a determined presence level of people in a supervised area. This allows, for example, to reduce the dynamics of a lighting atmosphere when a supervised area in a store becomes crowded.
WO2010/026521 teaches an area indication system for guiding passengers to the correct check-in queues at airport. The area indication system is capable of detecting the size of different queues and subsequently distributing a crowd among the queues, by attracting the crowd towards a shorter queue with the use of visual indication elements.